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This Year's Top Game Design Innovations
Next Generation has one of those end of the year 'top 10' lists we all love so much, with plenty of room for discussion on this one. They claim to have picked out the top 10 game design innovations of 2007. It's hard to argue with elements like Portal's portals or Mass Effect's conversation wheel, but was Metroid Prime 3 on the Wii really as good as a mouse-and-keyboard PC FPS? "When people ask 'How do we make a good shooter on a console' what they really mean is 'how do we make a shooter that feels as quick and responsive as a PC shooter on the console?' Apparently the answer is the Wii mote. I was blown away by this fact. Nintendo had always been the 'family friendly' console to me so I didn't consider the FPS ramifications of the Wiimote but clearly it's the best tool for the job. With some tweaking and some refinement down the line I could see the Wii (or a console with Wii like controls) becoming the platform of choice for hardcore FPSers, even over the PC. If this does become the case it will owe it all to Metroid Prime 3."
There's no way the Wii mote compares to a mouse and keyboard for shooters.
The only reason it's usable at all in Metroid Prime 3 is because the Z button auto-locks your view onto the target.
If it wasn't for that feature, the controls would be hopeless.
but if it doesn't make you a better player it's crap
Except that the controller doesn't exist separately from the game, and games are designed around controllers.
Consider how you move, jump, and climb, in an FPS with wasd? Its all *automated*! You run to a ladder and push forward and your avatar slings his gun and climb upwards. The designer removed all sorts of things from having to individually move your feet and arms and coordinate those actions, to having to sling your gun.
The holodeck sim has let the designer put all that stuff back in, and made the experience more immersive. So now if you pit a holodeck player against a keyboard and mouse player, but forced the keyboard and mouse player to individually move hands, feet, fingers, torso, etc, they'd be almost unable to move.
So, the keyboard and mouse is only a "better" controller if the game **compensates for the controller** and automates moving, running, climbing, etc.
But its a pretty arbitrary place to set the automation. And its set there because it creates 'reasonably easy control while allowing for reasonably challenging play', and that's a game design choice. Some games make you push a key to climb, some make you put your gun away, some games have auto-run, some games simulate fatique and have it affect your reticule size etc...
The keyboard/mouse could have even more automation, and do auto-aiming, auto-headshot, and auto-jump, auto-run (oh wait... autorun is already an option on most titles, and auto-aim is pretty common too...) that would make the game even easier to win than it already is; would that make it a 'better control scheme'? Does it make you a "better player"?
Alternatively if the keyboard mouse scheme did LESS compensation then the holodeck guy would suddenly start winning. If the keyboard mouse scheme does NO compensation, and you had to use the keyboard/mouse to articulate all your limbs then the only way you'd beat the holdeck player is if he laughed himself to death watching you try to aim your gun at him.
The point is that the 'controller' isn't just the hardware, its the software that interprets the controls, and the software part is pretty arbitrary. If a console player has dual analog sticks but the game auto-aims while the keyboard/mouse player has to cope with a reticule that floats around trailing the cursor instead of being the cursor... would keyboard/mouse still be superior?